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Saturday, September 12, 2009

Scrap Fun

I am in need of a quilt for an upcoming gift (more about that in later posts) and was trying to figure out what to do. I knew that it needed to be a small wall quilt so I started looking thru my Miniature Quilts magazines….starting with Issue number 2. MANY issues later, I came upon a strip pieced quilt that caught my eye and proceeded to start planning it in my head.

The first ideas was to use the strips that I had been cutting from my scraps, but realized that the smallest of those (1-1/2 inches) was still too big. SO, I moved up a drawer and pulled out the bits that were “too small to use”….ie narrower than 1-1/2 inches. They were perfect for piecing this quilt!!

I drew one of the block sections on Golden Threads paper and then put 30+ additional squares under the drawn one. I then sewed around the design using a threadless machine and achieved all of my paper patterns in one fell swoop.

I started with all of my scraps in the drawer, but ended up throwing them onto the floor so that I could get to them easier.

As I started paper piecing these blocks, I found two things that helped the process go easier. The first was to leave my machine in “Needle-Up” mode. By doing this, I didn’t have to move the needle up after every seam when I was wanting to pull the sewn piece to the back and start sewing on the next one.

The second was to select and cut ALL of the pieces for a certain seam at the same time rather than reaching down into the pile and cutting them individually.

After piecing the paper blocks, I removed the paper and put them together into the quilt top.

My original idea was to put a solid color fabric in the small border, but decided that it lost the sparkle that the rest of the quilt had, so I used a handful of 1-1/2 strips and created the stripe.

It was a fun quilt to make and I am truly happy with the results.

Now it is off to the home opener for the University of Georgia football team.